Referenced By / The Ink Spots

• Magical Maestro: After the singer's face is sprayed with ink, causing an unfortunate Black Face gag, he starts singing in the voice of The Ink Spots, referencing the fact his own face is now full of ink.
• Redd Foxx, one of the co-stars of Sanford and Son and its spin-off Sanford, would often sing "If I Didn't Care", noting it as one of Fred's favorite songs. Whenever he sang "If I Didn't Care", Foxx had the royalties taken out of his own salary out of love for their music, and NBC choosing not to personally pay for the rights.
• The original trailer for Blade Runner featured prominent use of "If I Didn't Care". The song quite blatantly clashes with the imagery.
• Manhattan: "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire'' plays during Charlie's atomic nightmare sequence.
• The Simpsons: The Treehouse of Horror XVII episode has Kang and Kodos invade Earth in the third segment, "The Day the Earth Looked Stupid". Jumping forward to three years later, Springfield is in ruins and the aliens wonder why they were not greeted as liberators, as they planned the invasion to rid Earth of "weapons of mass disintegration" which they refer to as "Operation Enduring Occupation" (in a clear reference to the war on Iraq). The segment ends with the camera pulling away from the smoking ruins of what was once Springfield, as "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" plays.
• A staple of the Fallout games:
  • Fallout: Setting the trend, the game's introductory cinematic begins with a close-up on a TV flashing classic 1950s images and icons, while "Maybe" plays. Slowly, the "camera" pulls out to reveal the TV set is in the midst of a landscape utterly devastated by warfare. For added irony, "Maybe" is played again in the ending. Y'know, as the Vault Dweller is exiled from the home they just saved, and marches depressingly into the wastelands... alone.
  • Fallout 3: The most famous of these by far, deliberately echoing the sequence from the first game. The camera focuses on a radio on a bus, as "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" cues up. It pulls back to reveal that the bus is a wreck, with debris scattered everywhere, and pulls further back to reveal that it's in the middle of the burnt-out ruins of Washington, D.C. The song cuts out as a Scare Chord plays, announcing the arrival of a Brotherhood of Steel soldier in full Power Armor. (Worthy of note: Black Isle wanted "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" for the original game's opening, but couldn't get the rights, which is why they used "Maybe".)
  • Fallout 4: "It's All Over But the Crying" is used for the first half of the first trailer, following a dog investigating a bombed-out house, the image overlapping (through static) to scenes with the family that lived there Just Before the End.
  • While not actually an Ink Spots song, the version of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" featured in Fallout 76 adds the band's signature guitar riff at the beginning of the cover by doo-wop group Spank.
  • Several other songs also feature on the in-game radio stations from 3 on: "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" and "Maybe" in Fallout 3, "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie" in Fallout: New Vegas, "It's All Over But the Crying" and all of the aforementioned songs in Fallout 4, and all of the above plus "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)" in Fallout 76.
• The Walking Dead: The cold open to "The Grove", with "Maybe" playing on the soundtrack, is very much in the style of the original Fallout, going from a wholesome kitchen setting to reminding that there's a zombie apocalypse underway. You almost expect Ron Perlman to narrate how war never changes when the opening credits roll.
• "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" was used as the credits theme for the animated short "Logorama".
• One mystery in Killed Until Dead has a prankster playing tricks on the suspects. One such prank is a fake Ink Spots record that drips literal spots of ink.